Wondering what it takes to get a web page to appear in the top listing of search results in Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask? Other than paying for those top “blue” spots, how do you get the search engines to decide who goes where in the unpaid listings they return? Certain very simple things can either inhibit a page from ranking or propel it to the top of the listings. Find out what these things are by taking a walk in the world of web page optimization as Li Evans shares ten tips to laying a foundation for optimizing the pages of your site.

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With the growing popularity of search engines into the global culture,
increasingly webmasters and marketers alike ask the question, "How do I get
my site to appear in the search engines?" The following ten tips will help
you optimize your site—that means laying down a strong foundation
for getting the pages of your web site to start making it into the search engine
rankings.

Why optimize? Because you want to make sure you're in control...that
you're telling the search engines exactly what the site's pages are
about. You want to give the search engines all the clues they need to discover
that your page is truly relevant for the keywords and phrases you're
targeting.

1. Do Your Keyword Research

How can you optimize a web page without first doing some research into the
keywords or key phrases that you would like to be searched for and found? Unless
you do the research, it's just like throwing strands of spaghetti against
the wall and waiting for something to stick. Keyword research is fundamental to
your optimization—whether you have one page or thousands, you should have
an idea of what words you want to optimize for.

Having a clear understanding of your goals when it comes to the keywords you
select is also imperative. Ask yourself, "Who is it that I want to find my
pages?" If you go too broad in your keyword selection, you could find
yourself in a highly competitive market. Go too narrow, and you miss the
opportunity to cast that wider net for traffic and rankings. Marketers must
strike a careful balance when optimizing the pages of a web site.

Unless you're a household name or your product or service has received a
lot of recent buzz, optimizing for your company's name or branded items is
something you want to avoid. Searchers tend to search on words and phrases that
have nothing to with your company's name, but rather on general terms that
describe services, products, or types of information.

Let's take a look at a made-up example: the Oasis Camels site. Oasis
Camels is located in a suburb just outside Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and offers
camel rides for parties and events. If someone just looked at the company's
name, they might wonder, "Do they raise camels?" or "Do they
offer camel rides?"

People around the Cherry Hill area likely don't even realize that Oasis
Camels exists; so do you think they'll be searching on "Oasis
Camels"? Probably not, unless maybe the company gets a splash on the front
page of the Philadelphia Inquirer, showing the mayor riding one of the
camels. So for our example company, the keyword research should focus around
"camel rides," "camel ride operators," and "camel rides
for parties." It should also hone in geographically on New Jersey and the
southeastern Pennsylvania region.

Now, you're probably wondering how to get that research done, right?
There are several free tools that can assist you in your research. Just keep in
mind that these tools have definite limits. Free tools such as Yahoo's free
keyword tool tend to give only the prior month's data on the number of
searches performed on a keyword. The issue with that is seasonality. If you sell
Halloween costumes and you're researching in March, your information will
be highly skewed. Paid services include Trellian's KeywordDiscovery, Wordtracker,
and Hitwise. Each
offers a varying degree of features.

Keyword research is the basis of all optimization. It's important to
understand what keywords will work for your business—keywords that will
not just drive traffic but will drive quality traffic.